Dear Saskatchewan,
Drove the 401 the other day and thought of you. The living line of metal crawling east and west as far as I could see probably had more cars in it than all of Caronport, and I had to pinch myself to convince myself I was there. Remember the good old days on Highway 1? When a broom-handle in the steering wheel and a brick on the gas pedal was almost enough to get us to Regina?
There was a report on the radio while I drove, Saskatchewan, about the people flocking to you from here for work and industry. The lady in the interview spoke in apologetic tones as she packed her bags. "If I told my friends I was going to Vancouver, or Edmonton, or Calgary," she said, "They'd understand. But when I say Regina... they say: 'Why would you want to move there?'" Go easy on her when she gets there, Saskatchewan: pour the prairie in slowly, like you did for me.
Don't get me wrong, I like it here. And there is something pretty poignant about being "from the West." The Elves of Middle Earth were from the West, you remember, and their hearts always ached for it. I can hum lines like "There's a feeling I get when I look to the West, and my spirit is crying for leaving," with real meaning now; and I can mumble lines like "though the last lights off the black West went, the morning at the brown brink eastward springs" with real knowing.
But when I got to the barbers and he learned I was Moose-Javian, he said: "I've never been out west. Is it really as flat as they say?" I laughed and said: "Yeah, and the telephone pole is the provincial tree..." Not to betray you, Saskatchewan, but I felt I would have only betrayed you more if I tried to explain. How could I explain what it's like, to stand at the edge of town and see the whole world, green and gold and hay-scented, stretching out around you, spread out like some great, shallow earthen-ware dish, filled to the very edge of its delicate, distended meniscus with unfiltered light?
Well, I'll try to keep in touch, Saskatchewan-- I'll try to think of you whenever I catch real glimpses of open sky-- and I'll try to keep the crawling lines of metal from wringing the prairie out of me completely.
But while we wait and see, take care.
Yours truly, Dale.
Dear Saskatchewan
On Fixed and Floating Land
There's a kind of holy restlessness, it seems, pulsing at the heart of Christian communities.
I think that as Christian communities, we'll know we're really beating with the rhythm of this God's heart, because we'll find in our midst the same kind of holy restlessness: an impulse to send, and seek, and renew, and send again. An impulse that moves us to laugh with each other all the more richly, to weep with each other all the more deeply, to embrace each other all the more warmly, because we don't know when or how the sending God might send us out once again.
The tendency, of course, is rootedness. Cain wandered east and built a city; Noah was so named in the hope that he might give the harried Sons of Adam rest; Lot pitched his tent in the plain outside Sodom and settled down there.
But Abraham-- and the seed of Abraham in him-- answered God's call to become an alien and stranger in the world. Abraham, the patriarch of Faith, embraced a life of holy restlessness.
Perhaps one of the most vivid descriptions I've ever read of this is in C. S. Lewis' science fiction novel, Voyage to Venus. Lewis portrays the planet Venus as a world entirely untouched by death, inhabited by a sinless King and Queen. Aside from small spots of 'Fixed Land,' the entire surface of this perfect world is covered by ocean. The extraterrestrial Adam and Eve of this new
As the story unfolds, a diabolical villain tempts this Eve to taste the forbidden fruit of living on the
Well, these things are on my mind a lot these days, perhaps for obvious reasons. But I think it's a lesson God is calling me to learn all over again: what does it mean to choose to live on the floating island of His will? What does it mean to refuse the alluring self-determination of the Fixed Land?
What does it mean to embrace the holy restlessness of the Christian life?
Where You Hang Your Hat
So: one month, 2741 km, one u-haul with auto transport, 4 jumbo rolls of Saran Wrap, 8 rolls of packing tape, 3 weeks of unpacking and (what feels like) 232 beaurocratic forms later, we're safely settled in Oshawa. As much as you can be after this kind of major life upheaval, we're ready to begin a new chapter, in a new city, in a new province with a new ministry, new church, new neighbours, new home.
As I look back over the last month, with all its crises, decisions, challenges and adventures, it strikes me that moving is one of those rare life-events that really test your spiritual, physical and mental mettle all at once. You get a unique, cringing glimpse of your own character when you're standing at the pay phone for hours on end in a lonely truck stop in Nowhere-ville Northern Ontario, with all your worldly goods loaded into a 1600 cubic foot transport van behind you, with your children wandering the parking lot listlessly, while you try as calmly as you can to arrange some last minute mortgage details that somehow fell through the cracks-- minor details without which you may not have a home waiting for you when you arrive in Oshawa.
For those of you who have been waiting with bated breath to begin exploring some new terra incognita with me, let me assure you that I intend to have my blog up to cruising speed again starting next week. But today, still thinking about the character-refining spirituality of moving and all, I'm mulling over some of the Bible verses that seemed to take on new layers of significance during the last month. Without further comment, here's a few that have been running through my heart over the course of this adventure-- a little "U-Haul meets lectio divina" for you:
Matthew 8:19-20: A scribe came up and said to him, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."
1 Peter 2:11: Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.
Leviticus 14:48-53 (don't ask): If the priest comes to examine [the house] and the mildew has not spread after the house has been plastered, he shall pronounce the house clean, because the mildew is gone. To purify the house he is to take two birds and some cedar wood, scarlet yarn and hyssop. He shall kill one of the birds over fresh water in a clay pot. Then he is to take the cedar wood, the hyssop, the scarlet yarn and the live bird, dip them in the blood of the dead bird and the fresh water, and sprinkle the house seven times ... Then he is to release the live bird in the open fields outside the town. In this way he will make atonement for the house and it will be clean.
Mark 10:29-31: Jesus said, "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.
Summer Reruns
4. Genesis 18:1-15
7. The Transfiguration
8. Worship, culture and eschatology
The Prairie Noah
About ten minutes outside Moose Jaw there's this obscure little museum called the Sukanen Ship Museum. It tells one of the most interesting pioneer stories I've heard in Saskatchewan.
Tom Sukanen was a Finnish sailor/ship-builder who immigrated to Minnesota in 1898. In 1911, he came to Saskatchewan to homestead a land claim, leaving his family behind in Minnesota and making the 600 mile trek by foot with all his belongings on his back. He filed a homestead near the town of Birsay.
Over six feet tall and weighing some 280 pounds, Tom was a man of almost legendary strength (he once clean-and-jerked the axle and wheels of a car at a town fair), infinite resourcefulness (he once knitted a suit out of bailer twine) and amazing inventiveness (he once designed and built his own threshing machine).
After the farm was well established, Tom walked back to Minnesota to retrieve his family and bring them out to Saskatchewan. When he arrived, however, he discovered that his wife had died in a flu epidemic and the state had adopted out his children to foster families. Twice the authorities apprehended him trying to bring his son into Canada, and when they finally threatened him with jail-time, Tom was forced to return to Saskatchewan alone.
And here's where the story gets almost surreal.
Dejected and isolated on his farm, Tom became obsessed with the idea of building a boat and returning to Finland. His plan was to follow local waterways to the Saskatchewan River, follow it to Hudson Bay (he'd already made this trip once by rowboat) and from there sail home to Finland. As large shipments of steel and sheet metal were delivered out to his farm, and as he completely abandoned his farming to work on his land-locked ship-building project, Tom became something of a curiosity among the gossips and scoffers of Birsay. Days they could hear his hammer pounding tirelessly, nights they could see the glow of his forge, as he built the steel hull and shaped the boiler for his ship.
From the Museum's description of the boat:
Tom's plan was to build the ship in three sections. The keel and hull would be water tight and could be floated on some very shallow water. The cabins could be loaded onto a large raft, along with other odds and ends. This raft would be powered with a motor and rudder, and by towing the keel and hull, he could catch the high water of the Saskatchewan River.... He planned to reach the deep water mouth of the Nelson River and then on to the Hudson Bay. There he would quickly have the various parts assembled and the steam engine and boiler installed.
Tom worked through the Great Depression on this unlikely project, forging and shaping the metal boiler, smokestack, pulleys and gears, all by hand. His status among the locals was upgraded from curiosity to eccentric and eventually to "That Crazy Finn," as he poured all his energy and resources into his strange obsession. When asked, "Why are you building a ship on the prairie?" he would reply with a stone-set face, "There's a great flood coming and I want to be ready to sail out of it home to Finland."
By 1940, Tom had finished his ship, but after a local farmer refused to tow the finished sections to the water, and after vandals looted and stripped the boat one night, and after townspeople began petitioning the RCMP to remove him from the area because his "junk" was a hazard, he had to abandon his dream a broken man. In the end, Tom was institutionalized in a North Battleford hospital, where he eventually died (April 3, 1943). His last words to a friend were: "Don't ever let that ship go. Don't let them tear it down."
But the ship lay derelict and nearly forgotten for almost thirty years. Much of it was wrecked by vandals and pillaged by scavengers, but the bulk of the remains were hidden on a farm in Whitebear, SK. In 1972, a Pioneer Village Museum outside Moose Jaw purchased and restored the ship, raising it as a monument to the indefatigable spirit that pioneers like Tom Sukanen brought with them to the often merciless Saskatchewan prairie.
This story has held a special place in my imagination ever since I first heard it. Something about Tom's dream to build an ocean going vessel in the heart of the prairies has always seemed distinctly Saskatchewanesque to me. It's that spirit of outlandish vision and bold resourcefulness and even a certain kind of creative restlessness that I've grown to love and am sure to miss about this place.